Did anybody else find the Night's Dawn trilogy to be a super letdown? Hamilton just keeps building up problems on top of problems, and you wonder how he's going to solve them, and then he piles on more problems, until suddenly the trilogy ends with deus ex machina.

That is the single greatest curse I have ever read or heard.

ARE YOU GERMAN?

I was once at an event where Chris Kraft did a Q&A, and somebody asked him what he thought of Werner von Braun. Kraft's response went something like this:

Good point. If we're going with the numbers I calculated, the rings would start at an altitude of 3760 km. That's well above the Space Station (altitude ~350-400 km) and imagine satellites that are in similar orbits. The Hubble Space Telescope is at 560 km altitude. The rings are higher still.

Tidal forces actually tend to push orbiting bodies out from the central body. Even as ring particles migrate inward due to whatever other effects, they might not make it in further than some orbit resonance with the Moon. That's the effect that keeps Saturn's rings from all collapsing in onto the planet (or expanding…

Yeah, the ring gives us a good reference point for measurements - brightnesses, positions, times - which could have answered a lot of questions much earlier than they were in our history.

In the Saturnian system, there are some moons (called "shepherd moons") inside the ring, and they do clear out gaps. However, they can't get very big, as they are inside the Roche limit where tidal stress is trying to pull them apart. Those moons have to be small enough and have enough tensile strength to withstand…

Actually, I think the general principle is that rings tend to spread out until something (like a resonance with a moon) stops them. In the case of my Earth ring model, those stopping points are the outer fringes of the atmosphere - which would drag ring particles down - and the Roche limit - outside of which the rings…

Oh, yeah - they are tremendous images, and they definitely got my brain going! I'm impressed that you took into account the Roche limit and such. It's just that for someone who spent so much time looking at pictures of Saturn's rings, the Cassini Division, Keeler Gap, and Encke gap kind of jump out, as does the icy…

Huge science error! Those are Saturn's rings. All the little gaps and ridges in the rings are due to the gravitational interactions of ring particles with Saturn's many moons.

I really liked "Into Darkness." I thought it was better than the 2009 movie. And I thought that the homages to the original movies worked more than not. I even enjoyed the radiation scene, well, except for the yell. My only real issues were that Kirk didn't get much development and that Khan wasting all those Klingons…

Wow, I love this one! The positive/negative interplay is fantastic.

It's pretty similar to what you see on NASA TV during spacewalks. I think that's clearly where the stylistic choice came from.

I liked it better than the first one, personally. The first one was great, but the plot was random, externally driven, and existed only to throw the characters together. In this one, the plot and conflict grows out of the characters' interactions. Sure, some of their decisions seem dumb and there are some plot holes,…

Even worse was the whole thing about how he would then fall farther than he ever had before...

Thwarted? Aww...

I think it looks weird because the camera is always looking slightly downward and shaking visibly.

I'll chime in as a Browncoat who did NOT like Serenity!

Fair enough. Consider my post just me supplying my favorite rejoinder to that argument! :)